William Boyd - Sweet Caress

I wondered what world he was living in where ‘everything is fine’? I didn’t blame or hate Cleve — just marvelled at his complacency.

One strange thing: I had the roll of film from my Voigtländer developed — I was keen to see the covert shot I’d taken of Cleve from the end of the terrace. It wasn’t very good but I found an image on the roll that I’d had nothing to do with. It was a long shot of me and Cleve standing by the lake, talking. Who had taken it? Someone had picked up my Voigtländer and had snapped that moment and preserved it. And, I thought, that someone had also wanted me to see it, or at least had known I’d see it one day. . Phil Adler? Irene? A stranger? No — I suspected the suede-gloved hand of Frances Moss Finzi. It unsettled me.

And then, in the perverse, unscripted way that life works, an upheaval arrived in the shape of a telegram from Hannelore Hahn, announcing that she and her travelling companion, Constanze Auger, were in New York for a few days before moving on south to Mexico. We had to see each other.

We met in the Brevoort Hotel on 5th Avenue. Hanna had changed: her hair was long, shoulder-length; she was wearing a cream crêpe de Chine dress with a red velvet collar. It was Constanze Auger who looked like the beautiful boy, the Bubi. Short blonde hair with the thick forelock hanging over one eye, face tanned, a shoulder-padded navy bolero jacket over apple-green Oxford bags, flat brogue shoes — but all this masculinity undercut by a pair of dangling jet earrings. She was very stern and tense as a person — even within a minute of meeting her I was aware of this: she didn’t have Hanna’s ease or sardonic sense of humour. For Constanze, it was as if her life was a serious mission of some sort, with an import only she could appreciate or understand and where ‘fun’ really had no part to play. She was striking-looking, slim, tall — heads turned in the Brevoort. She was a journalist, she said: she and Hanna were going to Mexico to write a book — text by Constanze, photographs by Hanna.

As I sat there listening to their plans I found myself envying them. This was a potent whiff of Berlin and its sense of everything being possible passing through Greenwich Village and rather showing the place and its denizens up. We ate, we drank, we smoked, we laughed — even Constanze, eventually. I could have been back in the Klosett-Club. The Brevoort, where I’d deliberately taken them, the Village’s beating intellectual heart, seemed sclerotic, timid, impoverished, provincial.

But maybe it was my own sour, damaged mood making me think like this. As I became more drunk, repeatedly ordering rounds of bourbon and ginger ale, my latest favourite tipple, I opened up to them and told them both about my affair with Cleve and the fiasco of the New Hastings weekend.

‘I tell you, Amory,’ Constanze said, lighting a hand-rolled cigarette, ‘he did it deliberately. He’s setting out — how do you say it? — marking the ground linings and the goalposts in a different configuration.’

‘The playing field. On his terms, you mean. Yes. .’

‘How could he take you to meet his crippled wife?’ Hanna said, seeming genuinely upset. ‘It’s disgusting.’

‘He just sees the world differently,’ I said, feeling I had to defend Cleve, somewhat. ‘Something that appears difficult, or a problem, to me, or to anyone, doesn’t seem like that to him. Everything has a way of being solved.’

‘It’s called arrogance, that attitude,’ Constanze said. ‘Or Solipsismus , yes? I live alone in my world. I have no problems. Who are you? What do you want?’

‘I don’t think he has any idea how I see him,’ I said, becoming confused, my mind blurry with drink, all coherence going. ‘I think he’d be outraged if I called him arrogant. Shocked.’

Hanna took my hand. ‘But you can’t stay here — in this situation. It’s impossible, Liebchen. Why don’t you come with us?’

‘To Mexico?’

‘Yes,’ Constanze added. ‘Bring your camera. Two photographers and a writer. We will make a wonderful book.’

In my mood of pleasant self-pitying inebriation, fuzzy and heroic with drink, in the company of these vibrant confident women, it seemed the perfect solution. I had money in the bank, it would be an adventure and, more significantly, it would show Cleve that I wasn’t prepared to fit in with his skewed, solipsistic vision of our future.

The next day I made an appointment to see him. We met in his office at the end of the afternoon. He was very calm.

‘How are you feeling, Amory?’

‘Much better, thank you. I needed the rest.’

‘Of course.’

He was sitting behind his wide desk, his jacket off, braided wire garters on his shirtsleeves, keeping his cuffs trim. I wished, not for the first time, that I had my camera, to capture Cleve like this, his eyes full of messages despite his compromised position as my boss — all his contradictions gathered in one room: casual, formal; editor-in-chief, adulterer; handsome man, inadequate husband; a power-broker who was about to find himself powerless in this instance.

‘I’m quitting,’ I said, deliberately using the American term.

‘No, you’re not. I won’t accept it.’

‘It’s not up to you. I’m going back to London.’

I think he was genuinely shocked — he hadn’t remotely expected this.

‘Don’t do anything rash,’ he said.

‘This is the opposite of rash. How I was living before was rash.’

‘Take a vacation. I’ll think of something. Don’t worry.’

‘I don’t need you to think of anything, Cleve, for once in your life,’ I said, feeling myself sag inside and my love for him well up, unbidden, unwanted. The man who could think of something. Who could think of anything. No.

I stood up and offered my hand, not confident of being able to speak without my voice breaking — and there was a secretary just outside the door. He took my hand in both of his and squeezed.

‘Amory. . I’ll work something out. This isn’t finished. Call me when you get back home. I’ll come over to London and see you.’ He mouthed, silently: I love you. I love you.

‘Goodbye, Cleve.’ I dropped my voice to a whisper to cover up the emotion. ‘I really did love you as well, for a while.’

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

I lied to my sister, Dido. I did sleep with a woman, once. It was Constanze Auger in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1934, though I’m convinced now that the whole thing was set up by Hanna. We had arrived in Guadalajara and had found a small, clean hotel — with running, drinkable water, electric light — when all of a sudden Hanna had to go to the German consulate in Mexico City to sort out a problem with a residency permit, or some such bureaucratic muddle, and she’d be away for a couple of days.

So Constanze and I were left on our own in the hotel — the misnamed Emporia Paradiso — waiting for Hanna to return, thrust together. We were perfectly at ease in each other’s company — the roles we occupied on our adventure south of the border were clearly defined. However, as the first day wore on it seemed to me that I was just a listening post — Constanze talked constantly, passionately, about this book she and Hanna were going to create (with a little help from me, perhaps). It was a bit manic but I couldn’t recognise true mania, then.

The first night she knocked on my door and I thought, oh God, not more monologuing, but before I could switch on the light, she shucked off her cotton pyjamas and slipped into my bed. We kissed — her tongue touched mine. There is always an animal instinct of arousal that flares up instantly when two human beings, of whatever sex, find themselves naked and pressed up against each other in the confines of a bed in the darkness of a room. Whatever you may be thinking — no, not for me, thanks — the close proximity of a warm unclothed body activates different triggers. It may not last long, this surge of atavistic lust, but it makes itself known very quickly. Constanze and I kept on kissing. She nuzzled at my breasts, I ran my hands down her back and squeezed her buttocks. She was incredibly flat-chested, like an adolescent girl, little mounds with nipples, and to me it felt like being in bed with a tall lithe boy (one key component missing) and I felt that sex-urge. Perhaps something might have happened but suddenly she asked for the light to be switched on, pinched one of my American cigarettes and lay beside me, smoking, and began talking about her book and her new doubts that Hanna was the right photographer to fulfil the ambitions she had for it, as if the last few minutes had never taken place at all. As I lay there, bemused, all excitement draining from me — I had lit a cigarette myself — I wondered if I was being offered the job as attendant photographer to the Constanze caravan. Nein danke , Constanze. .